We need to talk about ethical diversity

Last week I heard about an administrator I know slightly (I won’t name the university) who asked a professor who reports to her to nominate her for an honor, knowing the professor could not easily refuse. I texted a friend about it and he wrote back “are you surprised?”

I’m presenting a paper on “political bullying” in a few weeks at Georgetown Institute for the Study of Markets and Ethics (GISME). It’s about how there are rules prohibiting a supervisor from asking a subordinate on a date, yet there are no rules preventing the supervisor from asking that same subordinate to a political event or for a signature on a petition.

My paper argues that in the rush to address perceived political one-sidedness and self-censorship, the pressure to ‘even out’ political representation overlooks the more fundamental practice of bullying. While campuses have recognized bullying as a form of discrimination, contributing to a hostile work environment, the current pressure to speak, or not speak, in certain ways is often bullying by another name.

The real problem is that bullying is, at its root, an ethical failure. As the dean’s story illustrates, we lack a clear way to discuss the wide range of ethical standards in the people around us, a range that has nothing to do with political party, race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, generation of college student, or ethnicity. And it goes unmeasured.

Meanwhile, a highly visible movement on campuses is squarely focused on civil discourse and dialogue. Initiatives like Braver Angels, which runs workshops to bridge partisan divides, or the Bipartisan Policy Center’s campus project, concentrate on the process of disagreement. Their premise is that if students can be taught how to talk to each other, our civic fabric can be repaired. There’s an unspoken assumption that participants are actors of good faith who are merely trapped in a broken system of communication.

I told my friend I wasn’t surprised by the dean’s request of her subordinate, but the truth is, I was. For me, feeling surprise matters. When I hear a story like this, I don’t want to shrug and say “of course” or “naturally” or “what did I expect?” This would mean I’d made a kind of peace with lapses in judgement as just life as it is.

Viewpoint diversity as goal; ethical diversity as reality

Various viewpoint diversity movements, from Heterodox Academy to the slew of new civics centers, want to solve for ideological balance. They are mapping political affiliations, tracking which professors lean left or right, making sure students encounter conservative and progressive perspectives.

The new civics centers are part of a growing ecosystem. The SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins, for example, is dedicated to “strengthening global democracy” by fostering “informed, inclusive dialogue,” while institutes around the country bring in political figures to model civic engagement. The diagnosis is that the primary obstacle to a healthy campus or democracy is a failure of understanding. They seek to solve a lack of viewpoint representation or a deficiency in the skills of productive disagreement.

People vary wildly in their integrity, the degree to which they’ll actually do what they say they’ll do when it’s inconvenient or costly. Someone can tick every box on your political wishlist and still be the person who harasses female graduate students at conferences or be the department chair who hires his spouse’s catering business for all department events. Someone else might have politics you find abhorrent and still be the one who shows up and supports the team unselfishly. The HxA crowd talks about intellectual courage, about being willing to engage with difficult ideas. They’re silent on the question of whether someone is among the tens of millions who steal in self-checkout lines (15% of users).

I’ve seen my share of questionable ethics in my years in higher ed. Some are straightforward corruption: financial self-dealing, nepotism, explicit quid pro quo arrangements. I’m less interested in these cases, because they have names and policies exist to deal with them, even if enforcement is spotty.

In every organization, you see selective rule enforcement and legitimate policies used as weapons. This creates ‘atmospheric pressure’: bosses won’t threaten explicitly or promise anything directly, but they create conditions where people understand what’s expected and what benefits come from compliance. It’s the president’s chief of staff whose spouse is a photographer ‘available’ for faculty headshots. It’s the dean who mentions the non-profit she raises money for while discussing promotion. It’s all deniable. Nothing provable.

But everyone navigates by it. And the downstream effect when leaders behave without ethics is that everyone else does.

A search committee chair schedules a crucial meeting for the one afternoon when the two members who ask the hard questions can’t attend. A senior professor agrees to serve as dissertation advisor for a student working on an adjacent topic. Three years in, she publishes a book that covers much of the student’s planned contribution. She tells the student this is just how the field works. An untenured lecturer changes his signature line so that it looks like he has a tenured appointment in order to meet the requirements for a grant application. He ends up winning, so nobody says anything.

The thing is we don’t have good language for garden variety ethical weaknesses. Philosophers talk about supererogatory acts, going beyond what’s required, but there is not a parallel term for falling short of what’s required in ways that don’t quite violate rules.

We can think in terms of commission versus omission: the administrator who actively hires her friend, versus the one who doesn’t object when it happens. The professor who manipulates authorship order versus the one who notices and says nothing.

Psychologists talk about moral licensing, where people who do a good turn feel entitled to do a bad turn later. The professor who champions diversity feels licensed to demand his unqualified spouse be given a job. The one who ‘saves’ the department money on a speaker feels licensed to double-dip on travel reimbursement. They’re keeping a ledger where they think they’re ahead.

Business ethics talks about ethical fading, how people gradually adjust their standards through small compromises. The college scheduler start out planning to run a patronage system. It begins with one room assignment to someone helpful. Then another, and a gift card in return. Five years later there’s an entrenched structure of expected bribes that nobody quite decided to create.

Petty corruption – the small favoritisms, minor rule-bendings, and daily hypocrisies – is as common in academia as everywhere else. It just seems more hypocritical because people have PhDs. Every act creates an environment where everyone is implicated in small ways, which makes stopping larger violations harder. Nobody has clean hands.

Civil discourse advocates need to talk about ethical diversity in daily life. The “democratic norms” and “civil discourse” that organizations like the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation (NCDD) champion can be weaponized. In a culture of “atmospheric pressure” and “deniable” actions, “civility” is a tool wielded by those with institutional power, available to those the left and the right, by women and men of every background, to silence others and line pockets.

The civics centers want to teach democratic norms and civil discourse. They’ll come together on a canon of readings, with some polite conflicts at the margins. They’ll train students to disagree productively, to understand opposing arguments, to participate in democratic life. None of this addresses the simple fact that some people in the room will say whatever advances their interests, only to act on entirely different principles. You can teach someone all the norms you want. If they’re low on the ethicalness spectrum, they’ll learn the norms and use them as cover.

Addressing ethical diversity would mean treating vast differences in ethics like other kinds of diversities, as differences that exist, that shape outcomes, that deserve acknowledgment. It would mean admitting in mission statements and strategic plans that people vary in how much their actions match their words, and that this variation matters more than most of the things we do measure.

Recognizing ethical diversity is the first step

Recognizing ethical diversity would mean building recognition of ethical differences into how we talk about leadership, about institutional culture, about what makes a good colleague or mentor. Institutions have a robust vocabulary for gender, race, ethnicity, LGBTQ, or “first gen” dynamics in professional settings. But we have no language, no model for how to talk about the fact that some people operate with more ethical consistency than others, and that this isn’t the same as political alignment or ideological commitment.

Everyone reading this likely thinks they’re on the ethical end of the spectrum. Everyone has a story about why their own inconsistencies don’t count, why the gap between their principles and their practice is justified by circumstances. The person who fudged their receipts or claimed a library book was “stolen” had reasons. The ones abusing their position had explanations.

Addressing ethical diversity means recognizing that I might be someone else’s example of the problem, that my own sense of my integrity might be less reliable than I want to believe. The viewpoint diversity advocates don’t touch this because it would require the one form of self-examination that’s truly uncomfortable, not whether your politics are correct, but whether you do what you say.

Training in deliberative skills must be tied to training in ethical consistency. Reading great texts of the American founding doesn’t necessarily make a person less likely to bully a subordinate or wheedle a deal for herself. A more robust civics initiative needs to add a harder set of questions: How do we build structures that reward the colleague who follows through on commitments and doesn’t lie about his receipts? How do we create a vocabulary to discuss ethical fading and moral licensing with the same ease that we talk about ideological bias? Until the dialogue movement is willing to confront the fact that some actors are not, and never will be, operating in good faith, its solutions will remain partial, addressing only the most superficial symptoms of the problem.